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Now once you have stored everything, you can still find something very easily if you need to by performing a search. You have a small icon down here on the lower left hand side of the project window which is a pair of binoculars and it does indeed say when you roll over it "find a project item". If you click on there, we can now do a search. So let us say I am looking again for that golden gate image. I could just type in the word gate, hit okay, and it will locate that wherever it is stored inside the project window allowing you then to maybe drag it into a composition and animate it.

Now a couple more things here inside the project window which are really useful, one of which is the labels column. Now you will notice that each of these clips has a color label assigned to it and that is actually done through the preferences which I will be going over later, but you can also change them dynamically here inside the project window. Now this is useful say in this case, I have three compositions but this intro backdrop composite is actually used inside the intro clip.

So this is effectively my main clip and I want to make a visual reference to that here inside the project so it is very easy for me to open in the future. Well, you can do that simply by clicking in this case on the grey color label just to the right hand side of its name, and then go down and choose whichever color you wish to assign to it. So maybe I just choose sunset. I can see that that immediately separates it from the other two grey compositions and just make it stand out slightly differently.

Now a couple of things down here at the bottom as well, there is a reference here to an 8bit per channel color dept and this is based on the color dept of the project and how you are going to deal with the footage, and the color dept for a particular project you maybe working on. But you do also have a trashcan here for deleting anything inside the project window. Now you can select an item and go down and hit the trashcan, or you can drag an item down to do exactly the same thing.

However you can also to do the same just by simply hitting the delete key. Now in this case, I have selected the talltwosilhouettes.psd and I can see here at the top of the project window, it is used one time in one of my compositions. So if you go ahead and try and delete that, After Effects is going to ask you "You sure you wish to do so?" because it is used inside a composition. Well you can hit delete, you can hit cancel.

I am going to hit Cancel for just one second, every once and awhile you might to delete something and be absolutely sure about it and you do not wish to deal with the dialogue boxes, in this case you can hold down the Ctrl key and hit Backspace on the PC, or the Command key on the Mac and hit delete, and as soon as you do so After Effects will delete that clip for you without asking you to confirm it even when it is been used inside a composition.

Now this is handy also it is very dangerous. You now have a whole somewhere inside the compo. You have removed a layer. So do be aware of that. It is a handy shortcut that saves time but could also present you with missing footage later on.

Now once you have stored everything, you can still find something very easily if you need to by performing a search. You have a small icon down here on the lower left hand side of the project window which is a pair of binoculars and it does indeed say when... click to read more